MOBILE, Alabama – Mobile County District Attorney Ashley Rich did everything she could this afternoon to keep the prosecution of accused child murderer John DeBlase on track amid his lawyers’ cagey defense.

The capital murder trial, which has been postponed several times, is set for June 4. Rich tried to prevent yet another delay at today’s status hearing. The defendant’s attorneys have yet to come to her office to review the case file, she told Mobile County Circuit Judge Rick Stout.

“We don’t want there to be any issues,” Rich said.

DeBlase and his common-law wife, Heather Leavell-Keaton, stand accused of slowly poisoning 3-year-old Chase DeBlase and 4-year-old Natalie DeBlase in 2010 and then dumping their bodies. Prosecutors plan to try the defendants separately.

Among other concerns, Rich said today that the defense has not provided her with the results of a survey conducted to test possible bias of the jury pool or informed her about a psychiatric evaluation.

“We have not seen hide nor hair of an expert report,” she said.

Defense attorney James Sears said he and co-counsel Ashley Cameron plan to review the case file in the next couple of weeks. He also said the defense has contacted a psychiatrist but that he has not performed the evaluation of DeBlase, who has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.

Stout ordered the defense to set up the psychiatric evaluation by April 15 and produce a report by April 22. He declined a prosecution request to compel the defense to reveal who its expert is today.

“We have some strategy here. … I don’t think she’s entitled to now who our expert is,” Cameron said.

Stout also gave the defense an April 12 deadline to decide whether to request a change in the trial’s location because of pretrial publicity and to file a copy of the survey that the attorneys commissioned.

“We are analyzing that report now,” Sears said.

The trial setting has become a more sensitive issue in the wake of an appeals court ruling in February overturning the capital murder conviction of Lam Luong on charges that he threw his four children off the Dauphin Island bridge in 2008. The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that failure to move the proceedings cost Luong a fair trial.

Rich said after today’s hearing that it is important for a copy of the survey to made a part of the record even if the defense does not request a relocation of the trial because it could bolster the state’s case on appeal if DeBlase, 29, later argues that his attorneys erred in not seeking a move.